The questions not asked II – UN resolutions

It’s time to play another game of The questions not asked. This is where we examine the reporting of some news event and try and identify the obvious questions that should have been posed by the media, or the context that should have been provided to better understand the event, but wasn’t.

Today’s example is taken from a speech given by George W. Bush on March 8, 2005 and reported in the Houston Chronicle.

“The time has come for Syria to fully implement Security Council Resolution 1559,” Bush told a largely military audience at the National Defense University. “All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair.”

…

Bush, in a speech touting progress toward democracy in the broader Middle East, did not say what might follow failure to comply.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan also left the question open. “If they don’t follow through on their international obligations, then, obviously, you have to look at what the next steps are,” McClellan said.

So what questions were not posed? What context was not provided?

One immediate answer is to compare the situations in Lebanon and Iraq. How can Bush say that the Lebanese elections cannot be free and fair because of the presence of 14,000 Syrian troops there, when ten times that many US troops were present in Iraq during that election in January, but those elections were praised?

But that question was not asked, the context not provided.

But there is another obvious angle to this particular case that was also overlooked, and that is the way in which UN resolutions are used selectively to justify US policy decisions.

UN resolutions routinely call, among other things, for the withdrawal of foreign troops from other countries. And given that the UN is, for want of anything better, the closest thing we have to providing a global consensus, such resolutions should be taken seriously.

But this is not the first time that UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of occupying troops to be withdrawn have been defied. For example, Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco in his article US Double Standards in the October 22, 2002 issue of The Nation magazine says that more than ninety UN resolutions are currently being violated, and the vast majority of the violations are by countries closely allied with the US. He says:

For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999. Moroccan forces still occupy Western Sahara. Meanwhile, Turkey remains in violation of Security Council Resolution 353 and more than a score of resolutions calling for its withdrawal from northern Cyprus, which Turkey, a NATO ally, invaded in 1974.

The most extensive violator of Security Council resolutions is Israel. Israel’s refusal to respond positively to the formal acceptance this past March by the Arab League of the land-for-peace formula put forward in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 arguably puts Israel in violation of these resolutions, long seen as the basis for Middle East peace. More clearly, Israel has defied Resolutions 267, 271 and 298, which demand that it rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem, as well as dozens of other resolutions insisting that Israel cease its violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, such as deportations, demolition of homes, collective punishment and seizure of private property. Unlike some of the hypocritical and meanspirited resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly, like the now-rescinded 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, these Security Council resolutions are well grounded in international law and were passed with US support or abstention. Security Council Resolutions 446, 452 and 465 require that Israel evacuate all its illegal settlements on occupied Arab lands.

All the UN resolution pointed to be Zunes are very serious and are much older that the resolution 1559 being used against Syria, so that these violations are long standing. All this information is in the public record. Any reasonably competent journalist should know it and, when the administration (and this is done by both Republican and Democratic administrations) cynically invokes UN resolutions selectively to achieve narrow political ends, should be able to pose the relevant question of why only some UN resolutions have to be followed while others ignored.

But the mainstream journalists don’t do this. One question is why. But the more important question is, since they don’t do their job, what can we do to make up for it?

A Theory of Justice

I have to confess that this blog has been guilty of false advertising. On the masthead, of all the items listed, the one thing I have not talked about is books and it is time to make amends.

But first some background. Last week, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening having an informal conversation with about 20 students in the lobby of Alumni Hall (many thanks to Carolyn, Resident Assistant of Howe for organizing it). The conversation ranged over many topics and inevitably came around to politics. I had expressed my opposition to the attack on Iraq, and Laura (one of my former students) raised the perfectly legitimate question about what we should do about national leaders like Saddam Hussein. Should we just let them be? My response was to say that people and countries need to have some principles on which to act and apply them uniformly so that everyone (without exception) would be governed by the same principles. The justifications given by the Bush administration for the attack on Iraq did not meet those conditions.

But my response did not have a solid theoretical foundation and I am glad to report that a book that I have started reading seems to provide just that.

The book is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, in which the author tries to outline what it would take to create a system that would meet the criteria of justice as fairness. The book was first published in 1971 but I was not aware until very recently of its existence. I now find that it is known by practically everyone and is considered a classic, but as I said elsewhere earlier, my own education was extraordinarily narrow, so it is not surprising that I was unaware of it until now.

Rawls says that everyone has an intuitive sense of justice and fairness and that the problem lies on how to translate that desire into a practical reality. Rawls’ book gets off to a great start in laying out the basis for how to create a just society.

“Men are to decide in advance how they are to regulate their claims against one another and what is to be the foundation charter of their society…Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, not does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like…The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.” (my emphasis)

In other words, we have to decide what is fair before we know where we will fit into society. We have to create rules bearing in mind that we might be born to any of the possible situations that the ensuing structure might create. Right now what we have is ‘victor’s justice’, where the people who have all the power and privilege get to decide how society should be run, and their own role in it, and it should not surprise us that they see a just society as one that gives them a disproportionate share of the benefits.

Rawls argues that if people were to decide how to structure society based on this ‘veil of ignorance’ premise, they would choose two principles around which to organize things. “[T]he first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example, inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society. These principles rule out justifying institutions on the grounds that the hardships of some are offset by a greater good in the aggregate.”

Rawl’s argument has features similar to that young children use when sharing something, say a pizza or a cookie. The problem is that the person who gets to choose first has an unfair advantage. This problem is overcome by deciding in advance that one person divides the object into two portions while the other person gets first pick, thus ensuring that both people should feel that the ensuing distribution is fair.

(Here is an interesting problem: How can you divide a pizza in three ways so that everyone has the sense that it was a fair distribution? Remember, this should be done without precision measurements. The point is to demonstrate the need to set up structures so that people will feel a sense of fairness, irrespective of their position in the selection order.)

All this great stuff is just in the first chapter. Rawls will presumably flesh out the ideas in the subsequent chapters and I cannot wait to see how it comes out.

I will comment about the ideas in this book in later postings as I read more, because I think the ‘veil of ignorance’ gives a good framework for understanding how to make judgments about public policy.

Urban legends in academia?

Did you hear the story about the college professor who asked his class to write a mid-term essay on “Why George Bush is a war criminal,� and then gave an F grade to a student who had been offended by the assignment and had instead turned in one on “Why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal�?

I wrote about this in an op-ed piece that appeared in today’s (March 4, 2005) Plain Dealer.

You will be asked by the site to fill in your zip-code, year of birth, and gender for some kind of demographic survey. It takes about 10 seconds.

Update on 3/14/05

I received a call today from a person associated with Students for Academic Freedom informing me that this op-ed had triggered the release of more information on their website, where more details are given.

Although the student referred to had not in fact given this testimony at the Colorado Senate hearings as had been alleged earlier, the level of detail (which had not been released until now) provided on the SAF website is sufficient to remove this story from the category of urban legends since it does give some names and places and dates. But a judgment on whether this constitutes academic bullying will have to await the release of the facts of the case on what actually transpired between professor and student. My contact at SAF says that the incident is still under investigation.

Update on the update (3/15/05): It gets curioser and curioser.

The blog Canadian Cynic reports that new information on this case has come out and that Horowitz is now backtracking on almost all of the key charges that were originally made. Canadian Cynic highlights Horowitz’s statements now that “Some Of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point Was Right” and “”I consider this an important matter and will get to the bottom of it even if it should mean withdrawing the claim.”

See the article on the website Inside Higher Education. It seems to be the most authoritative source of information on this case.

Content-free political labels

Here’s a quiz. Who said the following:

“In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush calls 9/11 the day “when freedom came under attack.� This is sophomoric. Osama did not send fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hates the Bill of Rights. He sent the terrorists here because he hates our presence and policies in the Middle East.

…

The 9/11 killers were over here because we are over there. We were not attacked because of who we are but because of what we do. It is not our principles they hate. It is our policies. U.S. intervention in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 terror. Bush believes it is the cure. Has he learned nothing from Iraq?

In 2003, we invaded a nation that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us to disarm it of weapons it did not have. Now, after plunging $200 billion and the lives of 1,400 of our best and bravest into this war and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, we have reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world and, according to officials in our own government, have created a new nesting place and training ground for terrorists to replace the one we lately eradicated in Afghanistan.”

Was this said by some radical leftist? Some long-haired peacenik? Ward Churchill? Actually, it was Pat Buchanan, a staffer for Richard Nixon and long-time Republican stalwart writing in a recent issue of the magazine The American Conservative.

Ok, here’s another writer:

“The US economy is headed toward crisis, and the political leadership of the country–if it can be called leadership–is preoccupied with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

…

Oblivious to reality, the Bush administration has proposed a Social Security privatization that will cost $4.5 trillion in borrowing over the next 10 years alone! America has no domestic savings to absorb this debt, and foreigners will not lend such enormous sums to a country with a collapsing currency–especially a country mired in a Middle East war running up hundreds of billions of dollars in war debt.

A venal and self-important Washington establishment combined with a globalized corporate mentality have brought an end to America’s rising living standards. America’s days as a superpower are rapidly coming to an end. Isolated by the nationalistic unilateralism of the neoconservatives who control the Bush administration, the US can expect no sympathy or help from former allies and rising new powers.â€?

Who is this Bush-hater? Michael Moore? No, it was none other than Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

The point of my using these quotes is to illustrate my view that the labels ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative,’ ‘Democratic’ or ‘Republican’ have ceased to be meaningful in identifying people’s political positions on many issues. They may have at one time identified particular unifying political philosophies, but now have ceased to have content in that there are no longer any clear markers that one can point to that identify those positions.

Not all political labels have ceased to have content but those four broad-brush categories in particular are used more as terms of political abuse than for any clarifying purpose. Their only purpose is to set up fake debates on television’s political yell shows. If you advertise that you have a liberal and conservative on your panel (or a Democrat and Republican), you can claim that your program is ‘fair and balanced’ even though both people pretty much say the same thing on major policy issues, differing only on minor tactical points or on style.

It makes more sense, rather than identifying and aligning with people on the basis of these meaningless labels, to form alliances on specific issues based on where they stand with respect to those issues. And when one does that, one finds that many of the old divisions melt away.

The greater danger of labels (whether they be of religion, nationality, or politics) is that they are used to divide us and herd us into boxes and make us think in terms of what we should believe and who are allies should be than what we really want them to be. They are being used as weapons to divide people into ineffective warring factions and thus prevent them from finding commonalities that might lead to concerted action.

I do not agree with Buchanan or Roberts on everything they say. On some things I strongly disagree. But unlike the members of the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ brigade who should be ignored, they are serious people who often have useful information or perspectives to share and I read them regularly.

Dismissing the ideas of some people simply because of the label attached to them makes as little sense as supporting other people for the same reason.

Living in a reality-free world

Here is some news to curl your hair.

The Harris Poll® #14 of February 18, 2005 reports that:

– 47 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001;
– 44 percent believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis; and
– 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded that country.

Virtually no one who has followed these stories believes any of the above to be true. And this poll was released just last week, long after the David Kay and Charles Duelfer reports were made public, putting to rest all the overblown claims that were used to justify the attack on Iraq.

Also something that experts do believe to be true, that Saddam Hussein was prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. weapons inspectors, is supported by only 46 percent.

How is it that so many Americans seem to be living in a reality-free world?

The reason is that such falsehood as the ones listed above are strongly implied by influential people and uncritically reported in the media, or influential people stay silent when such falsehoods are propagated.

Take for example a speech made just last week (on February 17, 2005) by California congressman Christopher Cox at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Michelle Goldberg of Salon was at the conference and reports his exact words: “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and the facilities to make them inside of Iraq, and even more about their intended use, including that a plan to distribute sarin, and the lethal poison ricin — in the United States and Europe — was actively being pursued as late as March 2003.â€?

And who were the members of the audience who did not contradict Cox as this nonsense was being spouted? Michelle Goldberg reports that among those “seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, Missouri Senator Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson.� Cox’s comments were made while introducing Vice President Dick Cheney, who gave the keynote address.

Now it is possible to carefully deconstruct the congressman’s words so that some semblance of truth can be salvaged. But that would involve re-defining words like ‘discovered’ and ‘weapons’ and ‘facilities’ and ‘plan’ in ways that would make Clinton’s parsing of the word ‘is’ seem like a model of transparency.

So what are we to make of political leaders who can say such deliberately misleading things? What are we to make of other politicians who know the facts but choose to remain silent while the public is led astray? And what are we to make of the national media who spend enormous amounts of time and space on issues like Michael Jackson’s trial but do not provide the kind of scrutiny, factual information, and context that would make politicians more cautious about what they say?

Politicians who mislead the public may be just cynical in that they know the truth and are just saying things for the sake of political expediency. But the danger with allowing this kind of talk to go unchallenged is that it creates an echo-chamber in which people hear the same false things from different directions and start to think it must be true. When people start believing their own propaganda, then they have entered a reality-free zone and this can lead to disastrous consequences.

George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946) wrote “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.� The sad truth is that Cox’s speech is by no means the only, or even the worst, example of this kind of linguistic chicanery. One has only to go back to the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq to see even more egregious examples of deception by the highest ranking members of the government, and timidity and silence from the supposed watch-dogs in the Congress and media.

Is it any wonder that so many people live in a world that does not exist?

The questions not asked

You can tell more about the sorry state of the mainstream news media by the kinds of questions that are not asked as by the questions that are.

Take for example the news this week that North Korea publicly acknowledged having nuclear weapons and withdrew from the six-nation talks, saying that it wanted bilateral discussion with the US. The news communiqué from the North Korean government said that the reason it had developed nuclear weapons was to defend itself from possible attack by the US.

In response to this announcement, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that “The North Koreans have no reason to believe that anyone wants to attack them,�

Really? Let’s see now. The Bush administration famously created the ‘axis of evil’ that consisted of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The first country (Iraq) has since been invaded by the US, and the second country (Iran) now has US forces on two of its borders (Iraq and Afghanistan), with the bellicose language and arguments that preceded the attack on Iraq being now reprised against Iran

Then there is the fact that there are nearly 40,000 US troops in South Korea, along the border with the North.

Also, Rice identified North Korea as an “outpost of tyrannyâ€? at her confirmation hearings just last month. And Bush earlier called the North Korean leader a loathsome “pygmy.â€?

Given all this, I think a person might reasonably conclude that the North Koreans have grounds for being concerned about an attack.

So when Rice pooh-pooh’s North Korea’s fears about an impending strike, you might think that a reporter might question her about these past statements and ask her why she expects the North Koreans to believe her. But as far as I can tell, it did not happen.

Or as another example, take the case of the recent horrific bombing in Beirut that killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. In response to this event White House spokesman Scott McClellan is quoted as saying that the United States will consult with other members of the U.N. Security Council about how to restore Lebanon’s independence by ending what he termed foreign occupation.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher went further and said that the killing undercuts Syria’s stated reason for keeping 14,000 troops in Lebanon which was to maintain the multiethnic country’s stability.

Mr. Boucher also said that this “shows the distortions of Lebanese politics that are created by the Syrian presence that shows that the excuse, the reason, the rationale, that’s given for the security — for the Syrian presence really doesn’t work. It has not provided internal security for Lebanon, and therefore, in light of that kind of event, we need to look at the whole range of issues that we’ve had, including Syrian presence in Lebanon.â€?

Now when statements like this are made, the adage about glass houses immediately jumps to mind. How can these spokespersons say that one bombing in Lebanon, however major, underscores the need for the removal of 14,000 foreign troops there since no security has been created by them, when just down the street in Iraq there are more that ten times that many US troops present, yet civil war seems a possibility, bombings on the scale of what happened in Lebanon are almost routine daily occurrences, and lawlessness is so rampant that even the road to the Baghdad airport is now a no-go zone?

The reason that these spokespersons can make these statements is that they know they will not be pressed on the awkward contradictions.

The point is not that there may not be good reasons that explain away the contradictions. The interesting question is why these people are not even expected to make the case.

These are not isolated instances, and in future postings we will look at further examples and pose the question of why it is that reporters who have access to these spokespeople do not seem to ask the obvious questions.

Beware the Third-Tier Pundit Brigade

In a previous post, I seemed to be taking two contradictory positions. On the one hand, I argued that Third-Tier Punditsâ„¢ (of the Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin variety) contribute almost nothing valuable to the public discourse. On the other hand, I argued that they should be countered. So why should we waste time on people who have little to say?

The answer is that though they add nothing to the public debates, they do subtract a lot. To understand this point, let’s start with historian Juan Cole, author of the invaluable blog Informed Comment. He says:

“Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.�

Cole nails it. The main purpose of these people seems to be to fill the airways and print media with noise and confusion. Because they swarm through the media in such large numbers, they convey the misleading impression that they represent the mainstream, and their style of argumentation (shouting, sarcasm, ridicule, quips, and barbs) is such that the lack of actual evidence and reasoned arguments is not immediately apparent.

There are a host of well-funded foundations and think tanks and media outlets which are willing to hire telegenic young people who are facile with words and let them loose as front line troops in the media war to persuade the public that policies that in reality will harm them are good for them. These people get repeated media exposure and soon, like Paris Hilton, are famous for just being famous, although they really have little of substance to contribute.

The antennae of the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ brigade are carefully tuned to pick up the cues about what their patrons want. Want the public to support an attack on a country like Iraq that never threatened the US? Want to privatize social security and cut back on Medicare? Want to undermine public education? Want to take away even the little support that poor people get from the government? In a flash, the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ Brigade come storming out of their luxury penthouse barracks, laptops blazing, occupying all the vantage points in the media so that more thoughtful voices are squeezed out, leaving little room for reasoned discussion. They can do this confidently knowing that they will rarely encounter a knowledgeable interviewer or host who will hold them accountable or ask them to back up their statements with anything resembling a useful fact or a line of coherent reasoning.

Another ‘benefit’ of having the Third-Tier Pundit Brigade™ around is that they enable other extreme voices who voice much the same policies but in a more sophisticated manner (people like Charles Krauthammer and William Safire) to acquire that much-sought-after media label of ‘moderate’. These pundits are anything but moderate in their proposals. They only manage to appear so because they lack the shrillness of the Third-Tier Pundit Brigade™, the shock troops whose function is to soften up the ‘enemy� (i.e. public opinion) so that they will be more easily taken captive by the smoother-talkers and their pro-administration sponsors.

This is no trivial matter. The consequences are serious because this kind of know-nothing punditry lays the foundation for bad policies that go unchallenged. Again, as Juan Cole continues:

“The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg’s sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous. … They were never contradicted when they said this on television, though.
…
“The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skillfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years.�

To be a member of the Third-Tier Pundit Brigadeâ„¢ requires you to have no sense of shame because you will have to urge policies for others while exempting yourself from its consequences. For example, Jonah Goldberg was one of the most vociferous voices urging an attack on Iraq. When asked why he did not enlist himself if he felt so strongly that Iraq was such a menace to the US, he replied that it was because he was 35 years old, a new father, and enlisting would require him to take a cut in income.

Really? The fact that this war has resulted in the deaths and dismemberment of many American soldiers in similar or more dire need of exemption, and left many, many young children fatherless and motherless and in serious financial trouble, not to mention the deaths and devastation in Iraq, does not seem to cause him any unease as long as he personally does not have to bear the sacrifices he is urging on others. And chickenhawk Jonah is by no means alone in this kind of behavior.

He also said that “one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people.� Not “bring the guilty to justice.� Not “try to prevent such future occurrences.� Not “find out what made people commit this mass murder.� No, what is most important is to satiate his desire for death.

One wonders about the moral sensibility of a person who can so fervently wish for the death of anyone, let alone innocent people. Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire has tracked that over three thousand Afghan civilians, more than the number of those who died on September 11, none of them complicit in the attack on the World Trade Center, died as a result of the US bombing of that country.

Afghanistan is a country with a wretched history, abused and kicked around repeatedly by great powers playing their global games. Its inhabitants are among the poorest of the world’s poor. Yet Goldberg is comfortable calling for their deaths because he and his friends feel the need to lash out.

This is the time of year when soon-to-be college graduates are looking for jobs. Are you bright, articulate, photogenic, able to write glibly, have a highly developed sense of sarcasm, and are willing to sacrifice your integrity and say anything in order to advance the agenda of your patrons? Join the Third-Tier Pundit Brigadeâ„¢ and be all you can be!

The Unbearable Lightness of Third-Tier Pundits

In the educational system that existed in Sri Lanka when I was growing up, students had to decide in the eighth grade what direction their future education would take, Since I knew I wanted to do physics, I chose to go in that direction and the rest of my education consisted of heavy doses of physics and mathematics with absolutely nothing in history, geography, literature, and social studies.

Naturally, this created huge gaps in my own knowledge base that later in life I have had to fill in as best as I can on my own.

This is not entirely a bad thing. One benefit is that I have not developed a hatred for the omitted subjects that those who have had heavy doses of formal education sometimes get. I actually like history and read about historical events for fun. And as I get older, I find that I know a lot of recent history by default, as I have actually lived through events that my children must learn about from history texts.
[Read more…]

How I keep up with the news

I hardly ever watch TV news and talk shows or spend much time with other elements of the mainstream media. I don’t read the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or other so-called national papers unless someone directs me to a specific article. I also don’t read the popular news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report.

It seems to me to be a waste of time to try to follow all these so-called news outlets, since they all parrot the same establishment interests, with a narrow range of news and voices, all serving the interests of the elites.

However, I am a news and politics junkie and try to be fairly well informed, and I thought I’d share with you those sources of news and opinion that I find helpful in keeping up with events. I have permanent links to these sites on my blog home page.

For news sites, antiwar.com is a site that I have been reading since the time of the US involvement in the former Yugoslavia. It has had a consistent antiwar stance, while providing useful links to news and commentary you might not see elsewhere. The people behind the site are old-style libertarians and paleoconservatives who see US foreign policy being taken into dangerous interventionist and imperial directions by both Republican and Democratic parties.

The site provides links to a lot of news reports and is refreshingly open to opinions from all elements of the conventional political spectrum (defined by virtually meaningless distinctions such as Democratic/Republican and liberal/conservative), yet maintains a consistent antiwar perspective. It gives space to articles from the world’s press and to a range of analysts from Noam Chomsky to Lew Rockwell to Pat Buchanan to Alexander Cockburn to Charley Reese.

It was as hard on Clinton’s interventions in Yugoslavia as it is now on Bush’s policies in the Middle East. The editorial director Justin Raimondo’s columns (which appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, see top right of the antiwar.com home page for the link) are well worth reading

Another establishment voice is the BBC, but this site at least has a world-wide perspective, something that is sorely lacking in the major US media outlets.

Cursor is a very readable guide to current events with links to important news of the day.

I also read quite a few blogs. Some of them I read daily, some of them occasionally. Here are those that I particularly admire and recommend and the reasons why I consider them well worth bookmarking..

James Wolcott, columnist at Vanity Fair, can deliver a smackdown to sacred cows and pompous fools with a wit and venom that I can only envy, since I have neither the skill nor the temperament to match him. “I wish I could write like that� is the thought that keeps popping into my mind whenever I read him.

There are few around to match the knowledge and expertise on the Middle East that Juan Cole has. Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, is a scholar of the region who has published widely and extensively. He also knows the languages of the region and thus can keep up with the media there to provide truly Informed Comment, which is the title of his blog.

The nice thing about Cole’s site is that it combines scholarliness with lively and up-to-date commentary. And when the need arises, he can deliver a rebuke to the ignorant warmongers in the pundit class that leaves them reeling. Take for example his recent comeuppance of Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, a third-tier TV, web, and print pundit, who had the temerity to disparage Cole’s knowledge of Iraqi and Iranian politics.

Cole said:

“I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can’t read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq’s neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg’s opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.â€?

Cole ends up issuing this challenge to Goldberg:

“So let me propose to him that we debate Middle East issues, anywhere, any time, he and I. Otherwise he should please shut up and go back to selling Linda Tripp tapes on Ebay.�

I wouldn’t bother packing my bags, Juan. Chickenhawk Jonah is probably cowering behind his mother Lucianne (who along with her son rose to dubious fame as the peddlers of the Linda Tripp tapes from the Monica Lewinsky era), peering around and wondering if it is safe to show his face in public again.

(Update: Apparently Jonah rose up briefly from the canvas only to get knocked down again by Cole.)

Incidentally, Justin Raimondo also dissected Jonah in 2002, showing that not only is Jonah is way out of his depth, he is a slow learner to boot. One feels almost sorry for him, getting publicly humiliated in this way, although he keeps asking for it.

Atrios (aka Duncan Black) is well known in the blog world as the creator of the site Eschaton. I like his site because he monitors the news media and other blogs and finds interesting items and perspectives that I would otherwise have missed.

Joshua Micah Marshall, who maintains the website Talking Points Memo, is a knowledgeable Washington-based journalist who has access to informed sources inside the beltway and writes well on important topics.

And if you are not aware of the daily syndicated comic strip The Boondocks, you are missing a treat. Those of you who think Doonesbury tests the limits of edgy political and social comic strip satire will be surprised by how much further Aaron McGruder’s strip takes that form. He speaks truths and provides a level of sharp political commentary that is missing in the news and editorial pages.

Establishment papers such as the Washington Post are so spineless that they occasionally refuse to run The Boondocks, such as the two-week series where Huey and Caesar decide that the reason that Condoleeza Rice is such a warmonger is because she has no love life and decide, in order to save the world from her disastrous actions, to run personal ads seeking a mate on her behalf. To maintain on a daily level such a high level of political incisiveness and still be funny takes real skill.

Huey for President!

Phony-sounding concern

Why do politicians feel the need to go over the top when it comes to public expressions of sympathy? Why cannot they state what would be a normal and understandable expression of sorrow and leave it at that?

The Plain Dealer on 1/27/05 had a report on G. W. Bush’s first press conference of his second term, which occurred just after the helicopter crash in Iraq that killed 31 US servicemen and servicewomen. He said “And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life.�

Does anyone think that he actually weeps when soldiers die? Or that he has periods of mourning for them? More likely, such incidents are but passing events that occupy his mind briefly to be quickly replaced by others.

It is the families and loved ones of the people who die who actually weep and mourn their loss, It is not that the rest of us don’t care but our depth of response has necessarily to be on a different scale, The normal reaction of any person who is given news of a tragic event but is not directly affected by it is to feel sadness, to feel sorry for the families who lost a loved one, and perhaps ponder the fragility of life and the inevitability of death.

Those who supported the attack on Iraq might combine those feelings with a greater sense of resolve while those (like me) who opposed it might also feel some anger at yet another example of the deaths, injuries, and suffering caused to Iraqi and American people by this unprovoked and illegal war.

The recent tsunami killed about 250,000 people, most of them very poor, one third of them children, leaving ruptured and devastated families on a scale hard to fathom. About 30,000 of those deaths occurred in my country of origin Sri Lanka, but even then I did not “weep and mourn�, but experienced feelings of deep melancholy combined with shock at the scale of the deaths, surprise at its suddenness, and a sense of awe that nature could unleash such fury.

It is probable that “weep and mourn� was used as a rhetorical flourish, not meant to be taken literally, but it still strikes me as sounding phony in the forum of a press conference. It may sound natural coming from a clergyman in a sermon, alluding as it does to the Biblical story of Rachel grieving for her lost children. It may even sound appropriate for a politician giving a set speech in a formal setting where one expects some figures of speech. But in a question-and-answer format, which calls for a more conversational tone, it sounds artificial and forced, as if the speaker expects listeners to doubt the genuineness of his concern and so overcompensates.

George W. Bush is by no means the only politician who does this. I similarly cringed whenever Bill Clinton claimed “I feel your pain.� No, you don’t, I felt like telling him. No one can really feel somebody else’s pain. All we can feel is sadness, concern, and sympathy, all of which are worthy emotions, but trampled on by politicians in their eagerness to sound more-concerned-than-thou.